This three-article thesis looks at the effects of historical consciousness on the negotiation of ethnicity and the structuring of group boundaries among national history teachers in Quebec. The province’s ambiguous ethnic dominance between Francophones and Anglophones sets the stage for revealing how teachers from Quebec’s parallel history classrooms historicize meanings of the past for ethno-cultural awareness and agency. Depending on how inter-group realities are constructed, these educators can either promote inter-group comprehension or preserve rigid co-existence.
The first article theorizes how social actors’ differing capacities to historicize the past, or to generate moral life patterns for temporal orientation, underlie their negotiations of ethnicity and agency toward the “significant Other.” By developing a repertory of parallel and equal tendencies of historical consciousness for grasping fluctuations in ethnic boundary maintenance, the article moreover argues how social actors’ willingness to recognize human moral and historical agency is central to group boundary porosity.
The second article discusses the findings of an exploratory study conducted on inter-group attitudes and mutual in-class treatments between Francophone and Anglophone educators in Montreal national history classrooms. Whereas most Francophone respondents are indifferent to Anglo-Québécois social realities and historical experiences, all Anglophone ones know and transmit those of the Franco-Québécois to their students. Mirroring each group’s sociological status, this divergence implies a dissimilarity in how past inter-group relations are historicized. Possible non-recognition of Anglo-Québécois moral and historical agency moreover explains the prevalent indifference among Francophone respondents.
The last article touches upon an in-depth study conducted on Francophone national history teachers’ historical consciousness of the Anglo-Québécois. By testing my aforementioned repertory, the study analyzed how respondents historicize temporal change when negotiating ethnicity and structuring group boundaries. While their views on “history” and their historicizing of different thematic contexts overwhelmingly lead respondents to reinforce ethno-cultural differences and to not recognize human moral and historical agency, half of them nonetheless demonstrate openness to learning about and transmitting Anglo-Québécois social realities and historical experiences. Despite such willingness, reliance on pre-established historical visions for constructing inter-group realities nevertheless highlights the exclusion of the latter when respondents set out to develop a national identity among students.